Retraction Watch

Meet the hijacked journal that keeps rising from the ashes

Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases.

In early 2021, unknown hijackers stole the domain of the Turkish Journal of Rehabilitation and Physiotherapy. According to the journal’s legitimate publishers:

Author objects to “irrelevant reviewers” as journal retracts four papers

Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports has retracted four papers by a researcher in Saudi Arabia who claims “irrelevant reviewers” just couldn’t understand “a new area of statistics.”

Here’s the notice for one of the articles, “Neutrosophic statistical test for counts in climatology,” which appeared in September 2021 and has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science:

Weekend reads: Retracted papers that keep getting cited; ivermectin retractions; publishing peer reviews

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Japanese university recommends five retractions after investigating botany researcher
‘Our deepest apology’: Journal retracts 30 likely paper mill articles after investigation published by Retraction Watch

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 246. There are more than 34,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Japanese university recommends five retractions after investigating botany researcher

Kyoto University is recommending retraction for five papers by a former botany researcher there after an institutional inquiry turned up evidence of fraud.

The investigation of Lianwei Peng, who left the school in May 2011, found 11 images had been manipulated in the papers, according to a press release. The corresponding author on all five papers, Toshiharu Shikanai, may face disciplinary action, the university’s statement said.

Shikanai’s faculty page at Kyoto University, shown here in an archived snapshot from November 2020, now bears a message that “the requested page cannot be found.”

‘Our deepest apology’: Journal retracts 30 likely paper mill articles after investigation published by Retraction Watch

A journal has retracted 30 papers that “could be linked to a criminal paper mill.” The move comes six and a half months after Retraction Watch published an investigation into the operation.

The investigation, by Brian Perron of the University of Michigan, high school student Oliver Hiltz-Perron, and Bryan Victor of Wayne State University, identified nearly 200 published papers with apparent links to a Russian company named International Publisher. Many of those articles were published in the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, or iJET, and the researchers notified the journal of their findings.

In an announcement about the retractions and each retraction notice, iJET editors specifically cite the investigation and Perron’s communications.

A representative retraction notice states:

Weekend reads: Retracted COVID-19 papers keep being cited; “‘difficult’ name penalty”; economist accused of plagiarism

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

The Lancet more than doubles its impact factor, eclipsing NEJM for the first time ever
Author demands a refund after his paper is retracted for plagiarism
Seven months after an author request, journal retracts
February: ‘we don’t agree there is an issue here.’ June: Retracted.

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 245. There are more than 34,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

February: ‘we don’t agree there is an issue here.’ June: Retracted.

A Springer Nature journal has retracted a paper on hepatitis C infection it had previously corrected for problematic data – but in between the editors declared the case closed.

The paper, “The interaction between microRNA-152 and DNA methyltransferase-1 as an epigenetic prognostic biomarker in HCV-induced liver cirrhosis and HCC patients,” was published in July 2019 in Cancer Gene Therapy. The authors were affiliated with Al-Azhar University, in Cairo, and the Ministry of Scientific Research, in Gizah, Egypt.

Some two years later, Alexander Magazinov – a data sleuth about whom we’ve written before – posted concerns on PubPeer about the article and three other papers by members of the group.

Seven months after an author request, journal retracts

Two weeks after we reported on the unsuccessful efforts of a researcher at The Ohio State University to have one of his papers retracted for data manipulation, the journal that had been delaying the move has acted.

As we wrote earlier this month based on a request for public records, Philip Tsichlis had been urging Nature Communications since November of last year to retract a 2021 article from his group which contained fabricated findings. But although a second journal had reacted promptly to the request, retracting the paper in December, the Nature Communications editors didn’t – resulting in a series of emails in which the researcher negotiated the wording of the retraction notice and expressed increasing frustration with the delay. (Both journals are owned by Springer Nature.)

Now, two weeks after our story, the journal has retracted the article, “AKT3-mediated IWS1 phosphorylation promotes the proliferation of EGFR-mutant lung adenocarcinomas through cell cycle-regulated U2AF2 RNA splicing.”

According to the notice:

Author demands a refund after his paper is retracted for plagiarism

The author of a 2021 paper in a computer science journal has lost the article because he purportedly stole the text from the thesis of a student in Pakistan – a charge he denies.

According to the editors of Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, a Hindawi title, Marwan Ali Albahar, of Umm Al Qura University College of Computer Science, in Saudi Arabia, plagiarized from the student for his paper “Contrast and Synthetic Multiexposure Fusion for Image Enhancement.”

As the retraction notice states:

The Lancet more than doubles its impact factor, eclipsing NEJM for the first time ever

The Lancet has overtaken the New England Journal of Medicine as the medical journal with the highest impact factor, according to Clarivate’s 2022 update to its Journal Citation Reports. And the jump wasn’t subtle: The Lancet’s impact factor – a controversial measure of how often a journal’s papers are cited on average – more than doubled from last year.

Lancet can thank the COVID-19 pandemic for its surge.

In separate news, Clarivate suppressed three journals for self-citation, and warned a half dozen others.

As we’ve written in posts on previous years’ reports:

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